The Wright Stuff

There was a time not too long ago when pretty much my entire travel mission in life was centered around visiting famous works of architecture. And by architecture, of course, I mostly mean modern architecture (with and without a capital M). Let's say 1870s and later, shall we? Not everything I visited was from that period but it was heavy 1870s to 21st century. Heavy. 

And admittedly, there may have been a little (or a lot) of beer travel in there too but pretty much it was all architecture. I was a bit obsessed, in love with the profession I chose way back when I was a child without any concept of what being an architect might actually mean. I chose well.

I know I've detailed this story in at least one other post on this blog but the first architecture-focused trip I ever took was during my spring break in my last year of graduate school. And it was not really intended to be that way. I had the opportunity to travel on a free plane ticket gifted to me by my parents and decided to go to Los Angeles to spend a week seeing whatever LA had to offer with my unemployed friend as my personal tour guide.

But then disaster struck (for me). Between the time I booked the ticket and the time I boarded the plane headed to LAX, she got a job and could no longer spend time with me. So I pivoted, bought a book about Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in California and decided to be an architecture tourist. It was one of the best solo trips I've ever taken in my life.

Ginkgo tree leaves. Wright's favorite tree was the ginkgo.

Maybe a couple of words about Frank Lloyd Wright are in order.

For most architects in the United States, Wright is probably the greatest American architect in the history of this country. He moved architecture in our country forward from traditional space to modern space and he brought architecture to more people in the USA through the number of his works and the stature of just himself. If anyone out there who's an architect disputes that greatest American architect claim, they are either lying to themselves or they are confusing "greatest" with "favorite". There is a difference. 

In a complete non sequitur comment, if you need any more proof of Wright's greatness, how many architects out there have songs written about them by any artist that's really any good? Wright does. "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" closed side one on Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water album.

For the record, my favorite Amercian architect of all time is Ray Hood. But in terms of importance, Wright blows Hood away. It's not even close. In fact, for me, there's no other American architect that can hold a candle to Wright. 

Also for the record, Bridge Over Troubled Water is an incredible album. Not S&G's best in my opinion (I still prefer Bookends) but "Cecilia", "Baby Driver", "The Boxer" and the supremely awsome "The Only Living Boy In New York"...come on. And that's not even mentioning the title song. But I digress. This is about Wright.

Looking up at the laylight and lighting fixtures in the main space at Unity Temple.

My personal adoration of Frank Lloyd Wright started on that 1993 California trip. The very first Wright building I ever visited was the Freeman House in Hollywood and when I walked into the main room of that house with the missing corners, I was blown away. Everything they had taught us in school about how Wright contained and released space through his designs hit home all at once. It was absolutely incredible.

Over the next few years after that first encounter, I visited a lot of Wright buildings. Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin again. I went everywhere I could to see Wright buildings that were and were not open to the public. It helps that there are hundreds of buildings by Wright out there.

One of the best places to see Wright buildings is in the town of Oak Park, just a few miles west of Chicago. It's where Wright opened his first office and secured many of his early commissions, whether they be residential projects through social connections or commissions just a bit or a lot larger. Walk around town and you can see evidence of Wright's work right on the streets of the town. 

I visited Oak Park in 1995 on an architectural pilgrimage through the upper midwest that was Wright heavy. I've been to Chicago a number of time since 1995 but have never gone back to Oak Park. I figured a Labor Day weekend trip to see the brand new Obama Presidential Center might be an opportunity for a day in Oak Park to see if I was still as impressed with Wright's early work as I was 31 years ago.

Stork panels outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.

My memories of that 1995 Oak Park trip have for the most part faded away completely. I have a few photos from the five Wright buildings I visited that day either in Oak Park or in nearby River Forest and I remember being absolutely stunned by the children's playroom in Wright's own home. But I don't remember much about visiting Wright's major public commission in Oak Park, the Unity Temple. I figured a refresher visit to the Wright Home and Studio and Unity Temple would (hopefully) prove out my love for Wright and keep me going for a few more years before I needed another Wright pilgrimage. 

We booked a tour of the Home and Studio (there's no other way to visit the interior) and signed up for the "in depth" tour of Unity Temple. I figured if we are going all that way and don't have anything else filling our Saturday morning, we may as well do Unity Temple right, particularly because I don't remember anything about the last time I was there. For what it's worth, visiting Unity Temple can be done on your own for free.

We started at Unity Temple, but I'm saving that for last. Let's start with Wright's house.

Wright moved into his home right after he got married in 1889. The original house (he added pieces and parts, including his entire studio in 1898, later on) was not a Wright design and it looks like it's not a Wright design. He used the home and later his studio as a base of operations in Oak Park until 1909. During that period, 125 of his designs were built. That's an astonishing number, even for a 20 year period. Wright was prolific. 

Wright was also a professional exaggerator (particularly of his own deeds) and a philanderer and overall just not a quality person when it came to interpersonal relationships. The reason why he left the Home and Studio was that he had an affair with a client's wife while touring Europe. Quality, right? Oh and exaggerator might just be simpler said as liar.

After Wright left his wife, the home was divided into apartments. Today, it is restored to the 1909 appearance. 

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Oak Park, IL.

If the exterior of Wright's home is traditional, he set about changing the interior of the home to a decidedly non-traditional appearance immediately. He dispensed with the traditional Victorian approach to interior design which often created a different room experience in each space and made the palette of materials and colors identical from room to room. This may not seem like a big deal today but in the late 1800s, this would have been pretty revolutionary, particularly for an architect who was making a living doing this exact same thing in residences for people of means who might expect him to match the current prevailing trend.

Today, the interior of the Wright Home and Studio looks anything but avant garde or modern. There's a classical frieze in the entrance hall; the ceiling perimeters in the entrance and adjacent room are dentiled (those are the small blocks in a row in the first and second pictures below); and there is a swirling leafy pattern in the corners of the ceilings in the first living space that look very much like something Louis Sullivan would use in one of his buildings (Wright worked for Sullivan before establishing his own practice).

I can't remember any of these sorts of details being used in any Wright-designed building I have ever visited or seen in a book. And that's sort of the point. Over the years, Wright used his own house (and studio) as a sort of test lab of sorts, developing and trying out ideas that may or may not have been used in independent commissions he designed for others. So whether that experimentation was about details or expanding rooms or adding whole new chunks of spaces as addition, there are failed and successful efforts all over the building. I love the development of laylights as a lighting strategy and the shades as an alternative to curtains in the kids' bedroom that would never see the light of day in a Wright building ever again. Not everything worked; ain't that always the case? 

The highlight of our time this late summer in Wright's Home and Studio for me was still the children's playroom. It's a fairly simple space. If you ignore the sort of theater style theater seating at the entrance end of the room, it's a barrel vaulted space which is rectangular in plan with the vault springing from a point below adult head height. But it's perforated all over the place to admit an amazing quantity of light and the spatial quality is defined enough by the geometry while simultaneously disappearing as a solid mass to be something way more than just a barrel vault on a rectangular prism.

The side walls of the room are there but they are not there. They are defined by the walls adjacent the fireplace and the strong beam that serves as the spring point of the vault. But the wall below the beam is gone. It's just pushed out a few feet to make a bench or bay window space and the quantity and quality of light is just enormous in a very good way. More light enters the space from the laylight above (it looks like a standard skylight but what's on the other side of the curved, translucent panel is an above ceiling space that is illuminated by an actual skylight to the exterior) and through punched openings in the vault itself. 

How Wright does this is astonishing and simple at the same time. But back in the day when this room was first constructed, there may have been no other space like this ever built. It still blows me away 30 plus years later. 

The space is so small and it's difficult to photograph without going completely wide angle and distorting the geometry of the room but there are a couple of the best photographs below.

As impressive as the children's playroom was and is, this year Unity Temple was better. I can't remember the last time I just sat for a while and marveled at how complex a space was or is. I did that in Unity Temple on Labor Day weekend. This Wright guy was pretty amazing.

Unity Temple is a Unitarian meeting house on a tiny lot in Oak Park. The whole project was built on a shoestring budget on land which was heavily discounted by a member of the congregation. The building is packed onto the block and consists of two main volumes: a larger, streetside block containing the main space for church services on Sundays (the Temple) and a smaller volume at the rear for church functions (complete with serving kitchen) and administrative offices called the Unity House. The whole thing is made out of concrete, which apparently is a reflection of the budget (we were told Wright would have preferred brick).

The "in depth" tour of the building took us pretty much everywhere people can go on a regular basis inside the Temple, including into service and mechanical spaces but not (regrettably) into the laylight levels. There are signature Wright touches everywhere in the building, from the leaded glass that he was using in his residential designs at that point in his career to the stylized plants used as columns on the exterior of the building to entry into low-ceiling spaces before releasing you into the two main spaces in the Unity House and the Temple space itself to laylights used to distribute uniform diffuse light into spaces in the building that he was experimenting with in his own house at the time. There are also Wright-designed light fixtures and seating throughout the building. Again, not unusual for Wright. 

The stylized plants on the building, by the way, look suspiciously like the hollyhock decorations that Wright claimed to have invented especially for Aline Barnsdall in her Hollyhock House in Los Angeles which was designed and built about 20 years AFTER Unity Temple. Wright often stuck to his own version of the truth when it came to...well, just the truth in general.

And apparently, Wright's design for the pews in the building were rejected and the congregation used someone else's design. So ALL the seating is not Wright-designed. Can't imagine how that would have sat with Wright's ego.

The third photograph above shows the Unity House, with a signature Wright fireplace.

Frank Lloyd Wright fundamentally changed how architects in the United States (and the rest of world, I suppose) conceived of and contained space. Wright's architecture was about just that...space. Not rooms. Space. And space was not a thing to always be contained or defined in a singular way. Before Wright, buildings had rooms with walls and doors. With Wright, space was rarely contained or constrained or defined with six planes or something slightly more complicated. With Wright, the possibilities were greater. Unity Temple is fascinating this way.

Now, to be fair, there were some folks over in Europe messing about with this whole space vs. rooms thing at the same time Wright was starting to do his thing over in America so it's not like he was the only one with these ideas. And to be super fair to Wright, some of the folks in Europe were thinking about this idea because of Wright.

We were told on our tour that Unity Temple is more or less a perfect cube. I asked where the cube was. Not to be a smart aleck architect or anything. I genuinely wanted to know because exactly where the space starts and stops in the Temple is a matter of perspective that can constantly be changing. Is the edge of the space the edge of the balconies? Or the corner of the "columns" in the corners of the space? Surely, it's not the outside walls of the space (it wasn't)?

In the end, for me, it doesn't really matter where the almost cube is, although my bet is on the front of the balconies. The Temple space at Unity Temple is a rectangle in plan, maybe even a square. But it's really not, it's really a cross in plan. But then that cross also has a square (or almost square) within it. The space can be read on so many levels. More, in fact, that is articulated in this paragraph. But that's just an architect's perspective.

I am sure the first congregation of Unity Temple that walked into the space one Sunday to worship would not be thinking about space the way I've written about it above. But they must have been astonished by the character of the space. What Wright did in that space must have been mind-blowing. 

Basically, he designed a traditional space with four walls, a floor and a ceiling (bear with me here, I know I just wrote something that really contradicts this idea...) like a traditional box. Admittedly the ceiling is a grid of crossed beams with glazing to diffuse exterior light into the Temple but it can read as flat. Then he effectively tore off the roof, raised it up a few feet and filled the space between where the ceiling might have been and where he decided it should be. Effectively, he's supporting the ceiling / roof on nothing at all and allowing light to pour into the space from what seems like a continuous ribbon of glass around the entire building.

That's not what's actually going on (the structure is in the corners) but spatially, that's exactly what's going on. Who on Earth in that congregation would have ever seen anything like this before? The answer is probably "nobody" because it was absolutely brand new.

There's more to the Temple space than just space itself, of course. The design is super functional. The acoustics are near perfect, requiring no amplification for the speaker at the focus of the space and we were told there is no seat further than 45 feet from the podium. Honestly, if it didn't function well despite all the light and debate about where the corners or edges of the space are (by architects), it wouldn't be very successful at all. Wright was better than that. 

This trip for sure recharged my love for Frank Lloyd Wright. Other than the Guggenheim Museum in New York, I can't remember that last time I was in a Wright building. We stopped by a church he designed in Redding, California in 2018 but couldn't get into the building. How long before that? Maybe 10 years? More? Too long.

A couple of last notes. 

OK, so actually three last notes. The first one will make me sound old.

The last time I was inside and outside Unity Temple, I took 21 photographs. Back then, I was using slide film. I am sure I was super methodical about taking pictures to (1) make sure I didn't use all my film on pictures I didn't like; (2) minimize swapping out rolls of film; and (3) make sure I didn't run out of film. In the Home and Studio, I came away with just 8 pictures. This time? At least 100 pictures in each building. And all with something that fits in my pocket. I definitely appreciate the advances in photography technology over the years. I never would have wasted a slide on the shot immediately above. The sun is really in the wrong spot. But I love that picture.

Second, the cover photograph of this post is a concrete sprite from Wright's now demolished Midway Gardens project. Sprites pop up every now and then in Wright properties. This one is outside the Home and Studio.

Finally, over the fireplace in Wright's Home, there is an inscription reading "Truth Is Life". Look immediately above that inscription and you'll see that there is space above the fireplace where the chimney might ordinarily be. The space flows out of the fireplace nook, over the fireplace and into the corridor behind the fireplace. Except it doesn't. There's a mirror that makes it seem like it's that way. Whether the actual chimney flue splits and traverses upwards like it appears from the fireplace front I have no idea but the space above the fireplace is a trick. It's not truth. But then again, the truth was often a negotiable subject with Frank Lloyd Wright.

New Orleans Jazz

Every so often life hands you a travel gift. Something unexpected or completely unplanned or relatively inexpensive but always way, way too tempting to pass up for some reason. Maybe it's a destination wedding. Or a family member (or a friend) springs for a vacay. Or it could be a work trip either for a project or client or just a conference or something (and yes, work trips can have some fun tacked on every now and then). Whatever it may be, it's a bonus surprise. And you take it gladly.

Why start this post the way I did? Well, obviously because this year I got one of those unexpected surprises. And yes, it was a work trip. New Orleans. Late April and early May. But it wasn't MY work trip. It was my wife's. And this is the kind of work travel I can get into. No happy hours with colleagues or clients. No late dinners with your boss or bosses. Just get your work done remote (because I did log 8 hours each day) in the hotel and quit right on time and start exploring. And New Orleans is a place worth some exploring. 

Now, my wife did tell me before we left that she wasn't going to be able to pay attention to me during the day or even after hours on a couple of nights. I think I'm good, honey. I'm going to a bar and drinking some beer and listening to some music. And if it's the Big Easy, that music is jazz. Let's explore!

So I know what you might be thinking...isn't jazz dead? Or at least on life support? Well, without getting too Timotheé Chalamet about something...maybe. But not everywhere. Not in New York certainly, where you can visit a different world-class jazz club every night of the week. And definitely, defintiely not in New Orleans. Alive and well doesn't come close to describing the status jazz in the Big Easy. Thriving would be better.

Most people regard New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz. It's a tricky thing to ascribe the origin of any particular art form to a specific time and place but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a style of music emerged in the Crescent City that borrowed from African, Creole, Caribbean and various European music forms. This new type of music based in rhythm and syncopation with improvisation as a key component of its character borrowed heavily from southern blues, ragtime and African call and response music. It was unique. And it worked. It stuck!

New Orleans was likely the only place on the planet where this sort of music could develop. We often think of the United States as a melting pot but that's not really true in most places. We are a heavily segregated society even today, let alone in the late 1800s. But New Orleans was an exception. Its status as a port town on the Gulf of Mexico combined with its relatively loose attitude toward separation of races brought cultural influences, instruments and people together who wouldn't normally have any opportunity to intermingle. And out of all that came jazz.

Let's not get too confused about this subject. Jazz today and over the last century is and has been complex. It has spread across the country and the world and has been interpreted and added to and mutated in ways very different from what was created in the Big Easy 120 plus years ago. Big band swing, jazz manouche, be bop, hard bop and all sorts of other forms of jazz were created in places other than Louisiana. But it all got started in New Orleans. And it is very alive there today.

I am not a huge jazz guy. But my dad is (or was) and there is a legacy of jazz in my family that is passed down from my him to me. Now, truthfully, I've been a reluctant adopter of jazz in my life. While there have been times before my 50s that I engaged with this form of music in a couple of visits to New Orleans and the odd CD purchase over the years, it was really relatively recently that I could actually sit down at home and listen to a whole jazz album and enjoy it. And ironically, it was when my dad started losing interest in everything (including jazz) that I adopted part of his collection and consciously started listening to this / his music. 

I've documented more of my relationship with this kind of music and my dad in a prior post. I won't re-hash that same thing here. But suffice it to say, I felt much more prepared to like or love the music I would be hearing in New Orleans in 2026 that on prior trips. I also wanted to explore some New Orleans jazz history on this trip, rather than just camping out in some club every night I was in town. I wanted to connect the dots of history around this music.

If there's a place to start exploring the history of jazz in New Orleans, it's at the New Orleans Jazz Museum near the Mississippi River at the west end of the French Quarter. Now truth be told, I didn't start my 2026 jazz voyage here. I planned to make my way to the Museum on Saturday morning and I'd been in New Orleans since Tuesday night and there was no way I was letting all those nights in town pass without hearing some live music. So Saturday it was, with two shows under my belt already.

The New Orleans Jazz Museum is in the old United States Mint and it shares the building's exhibit space with displays and information about the Mint itself. It's not an hours long experience. I read about every word in the place and it took me a bit more than an hour or so. And sure, it included all the stuff that I wrote above about New Orleans being the perfect place for different muscical forms to collide and emerge as early jazz.

But it also told an older story about the origin of jazz in the Crescent City. One that I didn't fully understand until I got to the Museum. And like some tales like this, the uniqueness of New Orleans as a site for jazz to begin is in some part rooted in laws and rules that ultimately make little sense. But they led to something magical.

The economy of French colonial Louisiana, like every other place in the southeastern part of what is now the United States, depended on slave labor, African people torn away from their homes and families and involuntarily transported to the United States to be forced to work against their will (that is, if they even survived the journey). But unlike the American southern states at that time, French colonial Louisiana prohibited slaves working on Sundays and holidays. And for some reason, slave owners allowed their slaves to leave their properties on these days and congregate together. One of the places where they did that was Congo Square, where enslaved African peoples (among other things) created music. This was the first root of jazz in New Orleans. And it started as early as the 1780s, about 100 years before the generally acknowledged emergence of jazz.

Congo Square, Louis Armstrong Park, New Orleans.

If I got nothing else out of the Jazz Museum, understanding the historical connection to Congo Square was important, particularly because that was my first stop after the Museum. But being in a museum about jazz in New Orleans is only going to get you so far. There is a display with the following text on the first floor of the Museum. 

The jazz that you hear in...the clubs all over New Orleans may feature musicians of the present but it shares the syncopated rhythms, blues patterns, improvisatory prowess, spiritual depth, and breathtaking technique that echo more than a century of music in the Crescent City. These artists connect the jazz they play to their lives and the current world, just as Bolden and Jelly Roll did in their era. The best way to appreciate and honor the luminaries of the past is to seek out and patronize today's virtuosos as they continue playing and developing this music. Jazz is a living and changing art, and it thrives both within and right outside these doors.

Well said. Time to hit some clubs. Let's start with Preservation Hall, which is not where I actually started listening to live music on this trip. But from a narrative perspective, Preservation Hall is a good place to start.

It seems to me that there is a need to keep the history of jazz from a performance standpoint front and center in New Orleans. I mean this is where it started, after all. And I assume others feel that same way and that's why Preservation Hall exists. The place was founded as a performance hall in 1961 and has been carrying the torch for traditional, New Orleans jazz ever since. It's a dusty, grimy-looking, basic building on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter which hosts multiple performances of jazz on a nightly basis. 

The line outside Preservation Hall.

If you want to hear musicians every night that push the edge of their craft and are that making music that is breaking ground or super creative, Preservation Hall is not likely the place to do that. The music presented to us the night I visited was not current and I imagine most shows in that building are the same way. We heard music created by or played by (or both) Duke Ellington, Al Hirt, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman and others. None of those men in the prior sentence were either born less than 100 years ago or were alive in the 21st century. It’s sort of an oldies show, with the exception of Caroline Brunious’ original composition called Spooky.

Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with skilled musicians playing timeless classics. The 45 minute long experience is essential New Orleans and it was enjoyable. The whole mission of Preservation Hall is historical and deliberately created just that way, right down to the building where the musicians play. I mean there is no reason for Preservation Hall to look as old and run down as it looks. And it’s really not old and run down, it’s just made to look that way. It’s part of the act. It’s a stage set. Or a museum, if you prefer. And there’s a lot of value in preserving New Orleans’ history and presenting it to audiences every night.  

I had visited Preservation Hall on my first trip to New Orleans, which I would put at about 14 years ago (going from memory). I think going once a decade and a half is about the right pace. I assume the show here is going to be basically the same every night. It has its place and it's super valuable as a preserver of tradition.

Wendell Brunious at Preservation Hall talking to the audience at the end of the show.

We were in town in New Orleans this year for five nights, including the first night when we got to the hotel at about 8 or 9 p.m. I heard and saw live music on three of the five (but really four) nights. I thought that was pretty good. Preservation Hall was the only show I saw in the French Quarter. The best jazz in the city can be found elsewhere.

My intent on this trip was to make this a true New Orleans music week / weekend. I fully intended to find a New Orleans piano show and hear some zydeco to go with my Preservation Hall pilgrimage. If you didn't know it, the Crescent City has a long tradition of piano jazz. From Jelly Roll Morton to Alain Toussaint to Fats Domino to Professor Longhair to Dr. John to James Booker to Harry Connick, Jr. And I was set up to a solo piano show at the Maple Leaf Bar on Thursday night, the very place where James Booker used to be the house pianist. In fact the piano series on Thursday nights at the Maple Leaf is named in Booker's honor.

So Preservation Hall on Wednesday, Maple Leaf Bar on Thursday and I did manage to find a zydeco show at dba New Orleans on Frenchmen Street just east of the French Quarter. And not just some zydeco show...Rockin' Dopsie Jr. (somehow pronounced Doopsie) and the Zydeco Twisters on Saturday night. This is the same band (minus Dopsie Jr.'s father) that played on Paul Simon's Graceland album and a connection back to the legendary Clifton Chenier (and the King of the Bayou).

Zydeco by the way is an accordion-based music invented by French-speaking black Creoles in Louisiana and it hasn't really spread much further than its point of origin. In addition to the accordion as the main instrument in the band, it is not uncommon for someone on stage to be wearing a washboard on his or her chest which is played with spoons or some other metal device.

My music agenda was all set up.

And then I strayed.

Rockin' Dopsie Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters. dba New Orleans.

Before the Maple Leaf announced the Wednesday James Booker-themed show the week I was there, they posted an electric organ show on their schedule page on Thursday night. And it is about impossible for me to resist an electric organ as the centerpiece of a show. Look, we all have our vices and weaknesses in life. Electric organ is one of mine. So I faltered, turned my back on the piano show and bought a ticket for Wednesday instead of Thursday (which pushed Preservation Hall to Thursday). I like what I like.

Most music clubs in New Orleans are small and have about zero seats. Maybe they have some benches on the side of the main hall, which is sometimes little wider than a large corridor. I'm not talking about seated jazz clubs that serve dinner. I mean straight ahead music venues.

Both Maple Leaf Bar and dba fit this mold. They pack as many paying customers as possible into the place for a show who all eventually at some point make their way as close to the stage as absolutely possible. It's electric and it's loud and it's fun to be that close to the band making this incredible music. That is until it gets really hot from being in a mob of people really close to you in a place that can't actually have adequate ventilation for that situation. And inevitably either someone taller than you ends up standing directly in front of you or someone whose personal assessment of their ability to dance does the same thing as the taller person mentioned earlier in this sentence.

I'm not really complaining here (although it could easily be interpreted that way) but the dude who started out to my right at Maple Leaf but ended up with the back of his head about 12 inches from my face before he started bopping his head and shoulders back and forth and the women who both jumped right in front of me at dba and who both stepped on my foot (which hadn't moved) while "dancing", give me some personal space please. I lasted 45 minutes to an hour at the front of each show before retreating to the back. It was cooler in the back.

Joe Ashlar (organ) and Stanton Moore (drums), Maple Leaf Bar.

Both shows were fantastic. I'd go back and see either of these two bands perform any day. Could I complain about the covers a little bit? Sure I could. I didn't really need to hear Chris Stapleton's Tennessee Whiskey at the Rockin' Dopsie, Jr. show. I was there to hear original music from musicians trying to create music that is serious and which honors musical traditions created in New Orleans and elsewhere. The covers at both shows were mostly just a distraction from what I really wanted to hear. There was plenty of original music and I heard enough of what I wanted to go home happy both nights.

Was it jazz? I don't know. Neither show likely fits strict definitions of what jazz is to most people. I would think most people would be looking for some horns when they think jazz and there were none of these at least in the organ show that Joe Ashlar and Stanton Moore (with guests) at the Maple Leaf. But both shows had music with syncopated rhythms, blues patterns, improvisatory prowess, spirtual depth and breathtaking technique which is what the New Orleans Jazz Museum said makes up jazz. And for real, free-soloing around a consistent beat and rhythm was the foundation of both shows (except maybe for the Tennessee Whiskey cover).

And if you need any further proof on the Maple Leaf show being jazz, Stanton Moore's picture is actually in the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

Pictures of James Booker at the Maple Leaf Bar. Booker was a New Orleans original.

The first two times I visited New Orleans, I winged it with the music a little bit to a lot bit. I expected that I would be able to hear what I regarded as jazz (and, yes, I likely would have described it as something with horns) anywhere I turned. If there is any doubt about me winging it, let me say that on both prior trips I looked for some good jazz on Bourbon Street (apologies a little to Fritzel's for making that statement). Who seriously does that? I came away in 2012 and 2015, feeling that my New Orleans musical experience was lacking despite stumbling onto a pretty good blues show on Frenchmen Street the first time I was in town.

This time I did it right. I did a little bit of research on where to find the best music, checked out the artists on Youtube where I could to get excited about some and reject others and then made sure I had some tickets in advance of the shows. Does that kill the spontaneity a bit? Sure it does. But I wanted some music this time that aligned with what I love. And if I needed spontaneity, I had Friday night open for that if my first two nights turned out to be failures. I didn't go to a show on Friday.

Honestly, where else in the United States are you really going to be able to find this amount of music on any given week of the year and come away satisfied with three different shows? New Orleans' music scene truly is a national treasure, particularly for a city of its size. I could easily make an argument that New York City can offer the same sort of variety and quality but the population of Manhattan alone is five times the size of New Orleans. This much music in a small city is worth traveling to see and hear.

I didn't have New Orleans on my radar for 2026 so it was great that it worked out successfully. We concert-go here at home the entire calendar year when bands and artists that we love come into the DC area. We likely make it to 8-12 shows a year, which i know is not a huge number but it's a lot more than a lot of other people I know (not judging, just saying...). This trip to the Big Easy flipped my concert experience on its head. For four nights, I had to discover something that I liked over some dates that I had no control over selecting. It's a testament to the quality of music in New Orleans that I could do it and do it easily. I actually had backup shows on two of the nights. This was a huge success.

And one other thing...you can find James Booker music on CD way, way easier in New Orleans than you can find it at home. Or even on the internet. I came home with one to add to my collection.

Next trip: intentional travel on a trip we've been planning for months. Just like always.

Last pics: Stanton Moore drumming (top) and Rockin' Dopsie Jr. and his brother Anthony (on accordion).

Memory Of Water

Last month we spent a long weekend in Northern Arizona visiting a canyon. And of course by "a canyon" I mean the Grand Canyon. What else could I possibly be talking about? 

It feels like a long time since I've been to a canyon. It's not something that I seek out for visits very often. I'm not sure I can even remember the last time I went to anything resembling a canyon, let alone named a canyon. I'm thinking maybe Zion National Park in 2015. Does Hovenweap's mini canyon in 2020 count? I'm not sure. Canyons are just not my thing, I guess.

So how did we spend the day after our trip to the Grand Canyon? Well...by visiting another canyon. What else? Grand Canyon done. Time to visit Antelope Canyon.

Now, there is the very real possibility that you have no idea what I'm talking about when I write Antelope Canyon. But believe me, there's a very real possibility you know Antelope Canyon, even if it's just through online pictures of sinuous red-orange carved rock lit magnificently through cracks and crevices by the hot desert sun. You know...like the pictures above and below this introduction. Somehow, somewhere, you've likely seen some pictures of Antelope Canyon.

And it's very likely that you have been wowed by the photos.

I wanted to take and have pictures like you (and I) have seen online. But more than just the pictures, I wanted to find out more about this thing. It's not a canyon in the sense that the Grand Canyon is a canyon. And by that I mean a giant, gaping place in the planet way wider than it is deep. The Grand Canyon is a mile deep and at its widest point 18 miles wide. Antelope Canyon isn't like that. It's way smaller. It's also a slot canyon.

What's a slot canyon, you ask? I had to look it up. And just so you don't have to look that same information up...

A slot canyon is a canyon with a depth to width ratio of anywhere 10 to 1 to 100 to 1. That's a canyon that's between ten times deep and 100 times deep as it is wide. At its widest point, the Grand Canyon has a depth to width ratio of 1 to 18. Not 18 to 1; 1 to 18. If the Grand Canyon had a 10 to 1 depth to width ratio, it would be a tenth of a mile wide and a mile deep. That's pretty deep and skinny. If it had a 100 to 1 depth to width ratio, it would be 1/100th of a mile (or 53 feet) wide and a mile deep. THAT is a slot canyon.

The Grand Canyon was formed by the slow action of the Colorado River carving it's way through the Earth over millions of year. Not so with Antelope Canyon. Slot canyons are formed by sudden torrents of water moving at a very high rate of speed through soft rock (like sandstone). These sudden torrents of water are flash floods, which are typically only common enough to create something like Antelope Canyon in very dry locations where there is effectively no way for the land to absorb sudden large rainstorms. The carving of the rock is caused by the water moving at extreme speed and the fact that the water is carrying abrasive dirt and sand. Water carves out both large open canyons like the Grand Canyon and tall thin canyons that are slot canyons. But the action and the result is totally different.

Those flash floods, by the way, are still doing their work. If it rains at the wrong time, Antelope Canyon can be flooded with water to 25 or 30 feet deep in a heartbeat. Sound dangerous? Well, if there's nobody watching the weather, then I guess it is. But they typically only happen during monsoon season in July and August.

To get to Antelope Canyon, you need to do two things: (1) drive to the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and (2) book a tour. You need to do the first because Antelope Canyon is on land owned by the Navajo. You need to do the second because since 1997, taking a guided tour is the only legal way to visit. 

Before 1997, the Canyon was just open to anyone who could get themselves there. And there were side effects of that completely open availability. That meant trash, graffiti and those pesky and extremely dangerous flash floods. Since '97, it's been guided only. 

We booked our tour through Roger Ekis' Antelope Canyon Tours who took us out into the desert to visit Upper Antelope Canyon. And, yes, there IS a Lower Antelope Canyon (and more). We picked our trip based on reviews off TripAdvisor and figured we didn't need to do both Upper and Lower Antelope Canyons. Aren't they pretty much the same? We don't know that answer to that question necessarily. 

When we checked those TripAdvisor reviews, by the way, most were super positive, but some were overly critical about what I will sum up as the staged photography nature of the tour. More than one review complained about what I interpreted as a scripted tour where everyone on the tour was tutored in photography of the canyon so that everyone would emerge with the best (and presumably the same) pictures of the place. I'm not a huge fan of believing negative reviews, particularly when the majority of the reviews of any experience are very positive. Still, there were concerns there.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted those best pictures. But I also wanted freedom to take more than the classic photographs that everyone went home with. I hoped I'd get that.

I also just wanted find out what this place was really like. The images that are shown online are completely context-less. How do you get to the Canyon? How do you get into it and out of it? What's it like to walk through? How tall is it? Are there ever any people in this thing because there are never any photos with people in them it seems. I assumed I'd get this.

Antelope head in the top photo. The bottom is the sunrise and sunset scene.

So first of all...yes, the tour we took was heavily focused towards a series of what I'll call classic views of Upper Antelope Canyon. We were advised how to set the screen brightness and the filter on whatever version of the iPhone or Android phone that we happened to have with us and in a couple of spots, our guide actually took the same picture for each group on the tour. We have a vertical panoramic shot of us standing at the entrance to the Canyon and color and black and white versions of a spot where if you take the photo just right, it appears that you have angel wings. So does everyone else on our tour.

There's also a face in one spot, a couple of bears, an antelope, a sunrise / sunset scene and an alien. And the tour stops so everyone can take the exact same pictures. Everyone.

But you know what? If you didn't want to do any of that, that was fine too. If you wanted to do your own thing and take whatever pictures you like, you could. And so we did. We took part in most of the staged photographs but we also took pictures of whatever the heck we wanted. Our guide, Cindy, was just awesome. She was patient and thorough and even gave a very effective demonstration using water and the sand near the canyon of exactly how it was formed. The tour was honestly fantastic. And I think we emerged with some amazing photos.

But I really wanted to find out what the deal behind this canyon was. And we did that too.

The Grand Canyon is a large, long gash in the surface of the Earth. When you are standing outside the Grand Canyon you are on a very large and very flat high desert plateau and to look at the canyon you stand on the edge and look down. Want to walk into the Grand Canyon? Find a trail and walk down.

Antelope Canyon isn't that. It's effectively a very large sandstone lump (I was going to use the term boulder but it's way, way larger than a boulder) sitting on the surface of the Earth with a very large and not necessarily straight crack running straight through the middle of it. It honestly looks like some secret cavern or hideout from some fantasy or science fiction movie or series. I'm thinking Star Wars, Game of Thrones or Dune here. It's astonishingly different than the Grand Canyon. It's in fact probably as dissimilar as an experience as you could possibly get from two places with the word "canyon" in their names.

It's a heck of an entrance. And I swear I've never seen this is any of the pictures online.

The Navajo call Upper Antelope Canyon Tsé bighánílíni or "the place where the water runs through rocks". But they also refer to it as "The Crack", which is appropriate because that's exactly what it is.

The entrance to Upper Antelope Canyon.

Once you step into Antelope Canyon, you are in the world that shows up in the pictures online. You don't have to walk 20 minutes or so or even into the second "room" of the Canyon. Step in and you are in. All the way in. The sand path and light ahead of you hints at the way through the Canyon but look up and that rock just hangs over you like billowing sails frozen in time. The colors and the shapes are just amazing. Something that really only nature can create while it's almost unbelievable at the same time that nature can actually do this. 

It's tall. We were told 120 feet tall at its deepest point. You are dwarfed by the rock but you also don't feel like you are at the bottom of something really deep, particularly because you can rarely look straight up to the sky because the rock twists and turns above you. You don't feel like you are in a canyon in the traditional sense. 

It is also tight. There are places you can spread your arms and touch the smooth and at the same time rough rock walls (which are decidedly not anywhere close to vertical) on either side of you. Having said that, our group was I'd say 15 in size and I really didn't feel cramped for space that often. Touching, by the way, is encouraged.

The Canyon is tall.

The time we were allotted in the Canyon itself was about 30 minutes. It honestly felt longer. This experience was not rushed in any way, although I'm sure it helped that we were on the last bus from the tour company we selected and I'm sure Cindy allowed us a little latitude to dawdle a bit.

We walked through the entire length of the Canyon. I'm guessing it was between a quarter and a half a mile long, then we walked out of the back side of the Canyon, up a sandy hill and back over the top of another piece of rock that was to the left of The Crack as we entered. 

Did we see Lower Antelope Canyon while we were there? No we did not. We drove by it on the way to Upper Antelope Canyon but it's really nowhere near the place we visited. It's a totally different lump of rock with some sort of vertical fissure created by flash floods, rock and sand. There are apparently four additional parts of Antelope Canyon you can visit but it's not like they are contiguous or anything. They are likely just different sandstone canyons that look a little different. That's not what I imagined at all. I figured they would all be connected. Physically that is, not metaphorically.

Looking up at the branch of a tree in Upper Antelope Canyon.

This place is magical. It is as breathtaking as the pictures I saw before I got here. And by breathtaking, I really do mean it. That first room that you step into is astonishing. It is simultaneously gorgeous in its form and awe inspiring in its structural beauty. I can't really remember feeling this same way recently about a place we've visited that wasn't built by man.

I can also confidently say that there's no way I want to be in a place like this during a flash flood. As we walked through the Canyon, we saw limbs of trees wedged into the crannies of the Canyon above us. And not like at eye level or on the ground. Try like 25 or 30 feet above us. That means the water level during a flood is really that high. Can you imagine the force of a 25 foot high wall of water coursing through a narrow slot canyon all of a sudden? I'm not sure I want to.

On the name...we didn't see any antelopes when we visited. Antelope Canyon is located near Page, Arizona, which was established in the 1950s when Lake Powell was formed by when a dam was built nearby. When the Lake was formed, it interrupted the travel patterns of the pronghorn that lived in the area. Proghorn are often referred to as antelope but are really no such thing. That wouldn't be the only misnomer out there about wildlife in the American west.

Exiting Upper Antelope Canyon.

But...that's not the whole story. There are three more things. Yes, I know, three is a lot more things. I'll try to be brief.

First thing: The time.

When we booked our tour with Antelope Canyon Tours, every confirmation and reminder email we received (and there were a lot of emails...) prominently reminded us that our tour would operate on Phoenix time and to remember that. We figured this reminder was likely because the state of Arizona doesn't participate in Daylight Saving Time and that if you were coming from Utah (Page is just south of the Utah border) and didn't remember that the state immediately south of you was an hour behind you from March through October, you'd be an hour early.

So we are cruising along Arizona Highway 89 and all of a sudden the time on Waze jumps forward an hour. Arrival time is now 10:05 a.m. for a 9:50 a.m. tour time. What the heck? Did we somehow get delayed? Did we actually leave Flagstaff later than we thought we left? We were a little freaked out. We can't be late for this tour, can we? We checked the time in Flagstaff and in Page and both locations showed an hour earlier than Waze (which was really operating off the phone time) showed.

So we decided to check the time zone map of Arizona. As it turns out, not all of Arizona refuses to participate in Daylight Saving Time (see map below borrowed from the Department of Transportation website). The northeast corner of Arizona DOES observe Daylight Saving Time. But not the WHOLE northeast corner; there's a little piece of the northeast corner that is not connected to the rest of the non-DST-observing part of Arizona that also refuses to acknowledge Daylight Saving Time. And we happened to be traveling from the DST-denying portion of Arizona and through the DST-compliant piece of Arizona to the smaller DST-denying portion of the state. 

We weren't late. The time changed back to Phoenix time 1.6 miles from Antelope Canyon Tours' office. But as people who don't like to be late EVER, this was a little freaky.

Second thing: The bags.

The other reminder that we received (over and over and over again) in emails from Antelope Canyon Tours before we showed up in Page was that no bags were allowed on the tour. Check that...no opaque bags. Clear bags are cool. And they DO sell clear bags in the gift store.

We run into this kind of thing when we attend sporting events and we assume it's so people can't bring bottles of alcohol into the event but why would anyone bring booze on a Canyon tour in the middle of the day? So we asked when we checked in. The answer? People sometimes bring their trash and leave it up at the Canyon. This made no sense to us. It's OK for me to bring trash in a clear bag that I might leave for good out in the Canyon but it's no good if the bag in not clear?

But when we boarded the bus, we were reminded no non-clear bags and we were also asked to shake our water bottles. Huh?

As it turns out, the issue isn't trash, it's ash. Like ashes of deceased loved ones. Why anyone who is not Navajo feels like they should bring their dead relatives' remains out to this place is beyond me. But apparently people do it. And when they do, the Canyon has to be closed, cleaned and blessed before it can re-open. Don't bring human remains here, people. Please!!

Navajo Taco, Hope's Frybread.

Third thing: The frybread.

This trip had one more foray into Navajo culture and history besides just visiting Antelope Canyon. On our way up to the Flagstaff area, we stopped for lunch at Hope’s Frybread, a Navajo-owned restaurant in Mesa, just east of the Phoenix airport. I’ve had frybread before, most notably on my 2001 vacation to Arizona in the fall of that year. I can still remember the frybread topped with pineapple I had outside the San Xavier Del Bac Mission on the Tohono O’odham reservation just south of Tucson on that trip. Frybread is basically flour and water made into a crude dough and then deep-fried in oil. It was invented by the Navajo in the 1860s but it is very decidedly not an historic native American food. It was invented out of necessity based on cruel treatment of the Navajo by the United States government.

 

The Navajo, like many (or is it all?) Native American peoples, were eventually confined to a non-traditional territory by the government of the United States. “Non-traditional” in that previous sentence really means pretty much undesirable and way smaller than lands they had previously lived off. The best parts of their former land, of course, were taken for use by American settlers of European ancestry. Confinement meant just that: don’t leave the assigned area. But some Navajo didn’t want to obey rules they had no part in making, which brought punishment from the men (usually Army officers) assigned to keep the Navajo in their assigned spot in the new American southwest.

 

The punishment for 10,000 Navajo for a few of their people leaving their assigned territory against the Army’s orders? A forced 300-mile march from the west side of what is now New Mexico to the east side of that same state with a subsequent internment for about four years. It’s now referred to as the Long Walk of the Navajo. Of the 10,000 forced to walk across the southwestern desert, approximately 35% of those died either during the Long Walk or during captivity.

 

A major cause of death was starvation, a result of the inadequate rations provided by the government to the Navajo. Part of the meager provisions made available to the Navajo were flour, lard and sugar, which Navajo women used to make a kind of dough from flour and water which they could then deep-fry in the heated lard. That frybread is the origin of the stuff we ate on our way to Flagstaff and is regarded as a symbol of Navajo resilience. Rather than allowing the substandard ingredients they were forced to live with, the Navajo women in the 1860s turned those raw materials into something that allowed their people to survive. I see it as an eff you to the United States Government and I love that.

So before we headed north to Flagstaff and Upper Antelope Canyon, we had a Navajo Taco at Hope's. Ground beef, beans, cheese, lettuce, tomato and some kind of spicy sauce atop bread improvised from substandard ingredients. It kept me fed and nourished until Flagstaff.